I have spent the week at ISACA's North American CACS conference where senior Assurance, Security, Governance, Compliance and IT Management professionals assembled to discuss the theme "If knowledge is power, how powerful are you?" Interacting with these professionals gave me wonderful opportunities to meet and discuss what was on their mind, impacting their work lives and what trends were they experiencing. High on their list of discussion topics included cloud computing, changing legislation and its impact on technology, outscoring, social media, cyber terrorism, and scarcity of good IT resources and, to my surprise, the future of IT.

Immediately following my session about trends in information technology, a senior executive asked me if IT would be in existence in 10 years within enterprises. My proposition in the speech is that the role of the CIO and IT is transitioning from being the IT factory to specification of the components, negotiating with suppliers and then assembly. Even the after sales support and delivery may be the domain of others moving forward (I can hear it now I am being called a heretic by some in the community). The senior executive then shared with me that his organization is transforming rapidly to the new model, not dissimilar to my description and the value.  I was clearly intrigued and he shared some further information with me on the transformation and why it had taken place.  First the business identified that agility was a fundamental requirement of the changing dynamics of the business. The business mandated this change and IT had to develop agile development, sourcing and operational processes to support it all whilst ensuring integrity and compliance with standards (more on these aspects next week). 

The piece of data that resonated with me was the comment that the money spent on innovation was moving rapidly from large capital projects that were well controlled, good approval processes to OPEX. 

The move to OPEX for "grow the business" is not new.  Many organizations are reporting this and the reality is that without effective visibility for management, a perceived great decision in isolation could potentially be a poor decision at an organizational level. Reminds me of the role of a general on a battlefield, who in the past would stand on a hill to get all the input before making a decision. You need to get close to the complete picture to make effective decisions. Now I can hear the immediate comments that this will kill agility. I disagree. More often than not, agility suffers in the time it takes some organizations to gain the visibility to make the decision. I propose that with correct information you can make decisions faster.

Our discussion at the conference turned to how they were implementing this transition, with the simple answer being financial transparency for the business.  The business could consume whatever they could afford to pay for and IT was transitioning to leverage appropriate partners to deliver the capability. In short, IT was speaking to the business to understand their requirements, identify the partially finished IT products required, compute capability, storage, applications and so on and then aggregating these components together for the business. They would then charge a fee to the business for the service.

Personally I believe that more of us will be having these conversations with the business and we will be transitioning IT to the new model of service aggregator or broker.  The process has started, the evolution is underway and now we have two choices: embrace and lead,  or ignore and be led. Which one do you choose?